A refugee, a math whiz, two maids, a King's assistant, a Peruanito, and a bridge. One or two words can hardly describe the rich selection of titles the FDR Book Club members chose for the 2010-11 campaign, but these pithy descriptors do provide an indication of the wide variety of selections for the upcoming year. Without further ado and with your own drum roll playing in your head, the unveiling:
The book club chose two epics for the upcoming year, deciding to strategically place them when members will have more time available for leisure reading. We begin the year with Eggers' critically acclaimed story of a Sudanese refugee.
What Is the What
is an epic novel about the lives of two boys during the Sudanese civil war. For those who think they know about the so-called Lost Boys of Sudan, this novel will be an eye-opener. And if you think you know the work of Dave Eggers, this is in many ways a complete departure: it's straightforward and unflinching, and yet full of unexpected humor and adventure amid the madness of war. Eggers has been working on the book for four years now, deeply entrenched in the community of Sudanese refugees in the U.S., and in 2003 went to southern Sudan with a refugee named Valentino Achak Deng. During that trip, Deng was reunited with the family he hadn't seen in 17 years. What Is the What is a book about the lives of these two boys — one, at seven, too young to know what's happening to his country; the other, at ten, old enough to fight for the rebel army.
Through it all, the two boys persevere through one of the most brutal civil wars the world has ever known, finding themselves in one unbelievable, utterly surreal situation after another. What Is the What is thought-provoking, exciting, and repeatedly heartbreaking.
October: The Housekeeper & the Professor by Yoko Ogawa (192 pages)
Our October selection garnered several votes from the book club members and is eagerly anticipated by several.
From the Publisher:
He is a brilliant math professor, with a peculiar problem — since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is an astute young housekeeper with a ten-year-old son who is hired to care for him. And between them a strange, beautiful relationship blossoms. Though the professor can hold new memories for only eighty minuets, his mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past; and through him, the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the housekeeper and her son. The Housekeeper and the Professor
is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family where one before did not exist.
November: A World for Julius by Alfredo Bryce Echenique (450 pages)
We end the first half of the book club year with the classic 1970 novel that centers around a young Peruvian boy. This book garnered the most votes from book club members among the various choices.
From the Publisher:
Julius was born in a mansion on Salaverry Avenue, directly across from the old San Felipe Hippodrome. Life-size Disney characters and cowboy movie heroes romp across the walls of his nursery. Out in the carriage house, his great-grandfather's ornate, moldering carriage takes him on imaginary adventures. But Julius's father is dead, and his beautiful young mother passes through her children's lives like an ephemeral shooting star. Despite the soft shelter of family and money, hard realities overshadow Julius's expanding world, just as the rugged Andes loom over his home in Lima.
March: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (672 pages)
The big boy arrives! We'll be keeping you occupied over your summer/winter vacation (depending upon your hemisphere) with this tale from the days of King Henry VIII.
From the Publisher:
In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII's court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king's favor and ascend to the heights of political power.
England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. The quest for the king's freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum.
Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his personal losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?
With a vast array of characters, overflowing with incident, the novel re-creates an era when the personal and political are separated by a hairbreadth, where success brings unlimited power but a single failure means death.
In Mantel's 16th century monarchy, individuals must fight or embrace their fate with passion and courage. With a vast array of characters, overflowing with incident, the novel re-creates an era when the personal and political are separated by a hairbreadth, where success brings unlimited power but a single failure means death.
April: The Help by Kathyrn Stockett (451 pages)
Nominated by several members and enthusiastically voted upon for inclusion, April brings this popular choice (available in paperback, January 4, 2011).
From the Publisher:
Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.
Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.
Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.
Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobodyas business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.
Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.
In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women — mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends — view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't.
May: The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder (160 pages)
The final book of the year is Wilder's classic set in 18th century Peru which takes on the weighty questions of life in its brief pages.
From the Publisher:
"On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714,the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." With this celebrated sentence Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world.
By chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. Brother Juniper then embarks on a quest to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that led to the deaths of those who perished in the tragedy. His search leads to his own death — and to the author's timeless investigation into the nature of love and the meaning of the human condition.
